It has become a trend to offer and provide a vast range of new services in existing mobile networks and mobile communications systems. There is currently a very big interest in using mobile networks for multimedia or TV content. This is often referred to as Mobile-TV in the art. The goal for Mobile-TV applications is to offer a TV-like experience where the user can choose and easily zap between different multimedia or TV channels.
Ordinary TV channels are broadcasted to many users and typically the user can choose which channel to receive and view. Mobile-TV is similarly about delivering a set of (live) media or multimedia streams to several end-users. Each multimedia stream corresponds to a TV-channel, and each user shall be able to choose which channel to view. At the moment, broadcast/multicast delivery methods for Mobile-TV are under development. Examples of such standardisation efforts are 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Digital Video broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H). These will be similar to traditional TV, in their broadcast distribution fashion.
In the meantime, until Mobile-TV based on multicast/broadcast is available, there is a need for solution that can be implemented over existing mobile transport channels. It will also later be of big interest for cells with few users and for networks with enough capacity, where unicast transport is the preferred distribution means.
A mobile TV-like service using streaming over Internet Protocol (IP) based networks can be implemented into existing mobile networks. An example is the Packet-Switched (PS) Streaming Service (PSS) developed in 3GPP. In order to start such a multimedia or TV session, a user typically surfs to a web page or portal and clicks on or selects a link to look at a live-streaming channel.
There also exist several proprietary streaming solutions that could be used for Mobile-TV, e.g. RealNetworks, Apple's Quicktime and Microsoft's media player. These also typically have a portal or web page where a link is clicked to start receiving a certain channel.
One of the goals of Mobile-TV services is to make it possible to zap between channels, as one can do for ordinary broadcasted TV channels. If all channels are broadcasted, the receiver can locally choose between channels by choosing the appropriate transport channel and using an appropriate demultiplexer. This is the case for standard cable, satellite or terrestrial television as well as the upcoming mobile standards MBMS and DVB-H. However, for unicast sessions, the client must instead influence a “server” or multimedia provider to send the desired channel.
The traditional way of doing IP-based mobile streaming is to choose a specified content in a browser. This starts the download of a Session Description Protocol (SDP) or a Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) file, which in turns initiates a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) streaming session in a media player of a user terminal. The approximate time it takes until a user sees the content on the screen of the user terminal is typically around or slightly over ten seconds of which maybe five seconds is application setup and the rest is signalling (around two seconds) and buffering (around three to four seconds). If the user wants to switch to another “multimedia or TV channel”, he must stop the current data stream and go back to the browser where he chooses another channel by clicking a link. Then, a new RTSP session is started, the media player initiates and starts to buffer, and there is a new delay of about ten seconds.
In going beyond browser links for choosing a unicast channel, the simplest approach is to make an application which sets up a new streaming session to new URI (Universal Resource Identifier) every time one switches channel. This is quite general, but is quite slow in that a completely new RTSP signaling process must take place as well as a buffering of content.
In order to remedy this slow process, a faster solution has been developed [1], where each user has a continuous streaming session and can initiate a channel switch by separate signaling over HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or another protocol.